The best science-fiction films visualize the technologies of the future to reveal something about the human condition of today. But 95 percent of sci-fi flicks simply take stale clichés and dress them up with some robots and lasers and stuff.

Keeping this ratio of good-to-bad sci-fi in mind, we are now entering a very interesting time. Following the success of the original Star Wars in 1977, big budget science fiction of varying quality became a Hollywood mainstay. In the subsequent decades, there were countless cinematic conjectures about what the world would be like 20, 30, and 40 years in the future. And now that we have finally arrived at the once-unimaginable twenty-teens, we're beginning to run up against some of these big budget predictions.

Here we are in 2017, which is the setting for its fair share of sci-fi prognostication. As you might expect, many of these predictions—not only about the technology, but about the world in general—are totally off the mark. But it's also super interesting to see all the things these films got right.

The Running Man (1987)

The 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger blow-em-up The Running Man is set in a dystopian authoritarian version of 2017. The film's opening computer-font title sequence describes this gloomy future world as such:

"BY 2017 THE WORLD ECONOMY HAS COLLAPSED. FOOD, NATURAL RESOURCES AND OIL ARE IN SHORT SUPPLY. A POLICE STATE, DIVIDED INTO PARAMILITARY ZONES, RULES WITH AN IRON HAND. TELEVISION IS CONTROLLED BY THE STATE AND A SADISTIC GAME SHOW CALLED "THE RUNNING MAN" HAS BECOME THE MOST POPULAR PROGRAM IN HISTORY. ALL ART MUSIC AND COMMUNICATIONS ARE CENSORED. NO DISSENT IS TOLERATED AND YET A SMALL RESISTANCE MOVEMENT HAS MANAGED TO SURVIVE UNDERGROUND."

It's also worth noting that the film was based on a 1982 novel by Stephen King (under pseudonym "Richard Bachman" and 26 years before The Hunger Games was first published) that was set in the year 2025. I imagine the filmmakers decided to push the adaptation's timeline forward eight years to make it an even 30 years in the future. So, Mr. King's original prediction of a game-show ruler hosting post-modern gladiator games still has time to come to fruition.

Side note: Watching the film as a kid, I distinctly remember being particularly struck by the throwaway scene in which sodas at a vending machine cost $6. I've personally seen vending machines in amusement parks offer up sodas for as high as $3, but thankfully this vision of $6 sodas hasn't come to pass…yet.

Barb Wire (1996)

Barb Wire currently holds a 28 percent rating among critics at Rotten Tomatoes (and an even lowlier 14 percent from audiences). While the 1996 film chiefly serves as a platform for Pamela Anderson (then "Pamela Anderson Lee") to gallivant about in a skin-tight leather corset, it also showcases yet another dismal cinematic vision of crazy super future year 2017.

The movie's target audience of young males probably wasn't paying close attention to Barb Wire's historic cinematic allusions. But careful viewers might have noticed that the film is a gender-switched dystopian rehashing of Casablanca that swaps the Great War for a second American Civil War (and thus why the characters want to escape to Canada, which sounds eerily familiar somehow).

I'll be honest, I've never actually seen Barb Wire (and neither did anybody else apparently); nor have I read the comic book series on which it was based. But it's totally off the mark, right? While we may have our regional differences, we're not actually headed to a second civil war, right? Right?

(Stream it on HBO GO/Now)

Cherry 2000 (1987)

Cherry 2000 is yet another dismal, post-apocalyptic view of the 20-teens that Hollywood served up to the audiences of 1987. Seriously, if we're just going by the movies that came out back then, Reagan-era audiences seemed absolutely petrified of the future. What happened to the Star Trek optimism of previous decades?

In Cherry 2000's bizarre yuppified future wasteland, romantic encounters are arranged via technology (spot on, movie), but also require extensive legal contracts before they can commence (laughable, but not totally off base).

But nonetheless, Fortress's lead character, former military officer John Henry Brennick (played by the dude from The Highlander), is sentenced to prison for the crime of having a second child. In fact, his family is captured attempting to escape over that Canadian border. For his crimes of procreation, Brennick is banished to a tech-infused maximum security prison operated by the evil Men-Tel Corporation. While the concept of privately run prisons is not new, it is interesting how private-run prisons have become scorching hot topics recently.

The other big takeaway of Fortress's fictional prison is how it utilizes automation and robots so the whole thing can be run with minimal human oversite. While our prisons aren't quite up to this form of self-sufficiency, our economy is increasingly headed in this direction. Thanks to technology, we simply don't need many humans to keep society functioning, which will be a major issue in 2017 and beyond.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

In the original pair of Terminator films, the machine uprising is pegged to 1997, but as subsequent sequels approached this date, the filmmakers were compelled to push the date further back. Fast-forward to 2015's Terminator Genisys, and the robopocalypse has been re-scheduled for 2017 (which is also where the meat of the film's story takes place).

In the film's version of "2017," Skynet has taken the form of a unifying OS (codename: "Genisys"), which is some vague AI-infused cloud platform that promises to link users' phones, tablets, and laptops into one unified system. Sounds good to me! In fact, seamlessness between platforms is a chief goal of Big Tech in recent years—be it symbiosis between mobile and desktop, mobile and auto, or a unified interface for everything in the home. Furthermore, it should be noted that the hot hot hot trend in consumer tech is the utilization of advanced cloud-based machine learning algorithms. This is probably the technology from which a cognizant and malicious Skynet-like entity will arise—the end of humanity may come courtesy of some disruption-seeking Bay-area tech bros and gals. Thanks, Big Tech!

BONUS!

Parks and Recreation, Season 7 (2015)

Okay, Parks and Rec wasn't a sci-fi movie, but the much-beloved sitcom wrapped up its run in 2015 by time-skipping two years into the crazy future of 2017. The final season was peppered with farcical predictions: a Jason Bourne reboot featuring Kevin James; a new Pulitzer Prize category for listicles; how elbow-bedazzling becomes a hot new trend; and, oh yeah get this, the Cubs—the Chicago Cubs—win the 2016 World Series. Ha!

But the whole season has a tech-themed underpinning—particularly with the fictional Facebook/Google/Big Tech smash-up known as "Gryzzl." The Gryzzl offices depict HoloLens-like technologies and their latest always-sensing devices use data mining to determine their user's emotional states (and upsell to them accordingly). Technology secretly lifescraping your data for marketing purposes? That would never really happen in 2017.

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About the Author

Evan Dashevsky is a features editor with PCMag and host of our live interview series The Convo. He can usually be found listening to blisteringly loud noises on his headphones while exploring the nexus between tech, culture, and politics. Follow his thought sneezes over on the Twitter (@haldash) and slightly more in-depth diatribin' over on the Fac... See Full Bio

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